The Bedtrick

Wendy Doniger, a scholar of Hindu mythology at the University of Chicago, gathers a wide range of tales about the bedtrick, a plot in which one person is tricked into sleeping with someone other than the partner they expected. Her sources run from ancient Hindu and Hebrew writings to a recent item from the tabloid Weekly World News, and the stories show how people get tangled in these awkward sexual situations and sometimes wriggle free.

The collection includes wives who unknowingly sleep with their own husbands. It also includes a poem about a bedtrick written by Abraham Lincoln, which is by most accounts a rather weak piece of verse. Readers will also see that the Clinton scandal was far from the first time a man was linked to an unusual bodily feature.